In Vitis Veritas: Wine, Wisdom & Awakening

After two rough bottles in a row, I was beginning to lose faith in this mission to find great wines for $15 and under. We were down to one last bottle in the house from my big BevMo run last month, and I was dubious. The Domaine Ste. Michelle Non-Vintage Brut (on-sale for $7.99) was chilled and opened without occasion or ritual, and I poured my glass with a definite lack of gusto, mindlessly gnawing on a piece of baguette.

The Domain Ste. Michelle Brut deserved so much more.

This delightful Columbia Valley sparkling wine mimicked the bubbles of Champagne in all the right ways, from the chardonnay/pinot noir grape blend to the soft yeastiness to the delicate, dancing effervescence. One sip and suddenly I was laying in a hay field, hiding my face from the sun under the protective branches of a lemon tree, letting the yellow straw tickle the backs of my knees. The scent of home-baked bread spread with fresh clotted cream and almond paste was leaking alluringly from the picnic basket by my side as I basked in the moment, lightly pulling the petals off fragrant flowers in a state of love- and sunshine-induced intoxication. The hymns of my childhood played softly in the distance, drifting toward me from the lovely steeples of the Church of Saint Michelle.

It is a truly beautiful thing to experience faith restored.

Cheers to that.

For a long time now I’ve seen the Crayola-esque labels of House Wine resting quaintly on the wine shop shelves, and for a long time now I’ve been interested in taking it for a spin. It’s the simplicity of the classic 3rd grade drawing-level house on the label that appeals to me, and I think the name is clever. House wine. Get it? Of course you do. In addition, I am a sucker for blends. Blend it and bring it, is what I say. So, the House Wine from The Magnificent Wine Co. of Washington State, with its 6 red grapes, its charming, elementary design, and its $13.99 price tag, made the cut as my Saturday evening vino.

If I had been tasting blind, I would have guessed this wine to be a Merlot, but House Wine is primarily Cabernet Sauvignon (73%), though it does offer doses of both Merlot (10%) and Syrah (8%) as well as bits of Sangiovese, Malbec, and Cab Franc tossed in—all sourced from Columbia Valley, WA. Surprisingly rusted in my glass with a very ripe and slightly chemically nose like rotting fruit, at first I feared it might be oxidized. I soon realized, disappointedly, that it simply is just not that great.

It is, however, exactly what it promises to be: a house wine. It’s a fair table wine with moderate alcohol and a pleasing if unremarkable palate full of soft raspberries and vanilla. It’s the slightly dimwitted yet attractive girl in your local 4-H Club (is that reference too Sonoma? Your local Chess Club, then…) who is often staring out into space, forgetting her own phone number, or trying to punch holes with a hole-puncher in one of the cascading waves of strawberry blond hair rolling past her cheekbone. Although she doesn’t bring a whole lot to the table, she is entirely inoffensive, and her simplicity is in fact endearing and somehow interesting. She might not knock you dead with her sharp wit and intellectual banter, but she will laugh happily at all your jokes. What more can you ask for from a girl who still draws with crayons?

Cheers.

I once knew a man in the wine industry who made it his personal goal to, upon retirement, enjoy a glass of fine champagne every night. To him, this simple act must have implied a retirement characterized by relaxation, a certain level of financial soundness, and just a touch of self-indulgent luxury after a lifetime of sweat and toil. A few years ago, I heard from a mutual friend that this man did in fact retire, and did, in fact, enjoy his glass of fine champagne on a nightly basis. My kind of man, right there.

This little story popped into my head the other night while going over my goals for 2010 and beyond. For a lifetime wine lover and someone who made his living off the stuff, it seems a fitting long-term objective, and I wondered if I could steal his idea, change the names and the dates and make it my ultimate goal to work hard enough and be inventive enough and stay healthy enough that I can afford myself a glass of fine wine by the time I retire in, say, 2050 (ambitious, I know…insert Medicare joke here). And this thought, as I glanced at my short tip stack from last night’s shift in the restaurant, led immediately to another: if I plan on drinking the good stuff every night for the last 20 or 30 income-less years of my life, I better stop messing around and start pinching pennies.

If you folks are up for it, I am going to stick with a theme here for a little while. One of my gifts from Thomas this Christmas was a book called The Wine Trials 2010, by Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch (trying saying that after tossing a few back). It is a guide to inexpensive wine: 150 readily available bottles under $15 that apparently beat $50+ bottles in blind tastings. I’m not going to try to pull a “Julie & Julia” thing and document my way through the whole book, but I do plan on checking some of these wines out with you by my side because, honestly, who doesn’t love getting a bang for their buck on a bottle of bliss?

First up, the Bodega Norton Barrel Select Cabernet Sauvignon 2006, Mendoza, Argentina. Now, we (ahem, Tom) actually goofed on this one. The wine in the book is not the “Barrel Select,” but just the plain ol’ Cab. The book also reviews the 2008. Still, the wine in the book is listed as $11, and the “Barrel Select” was snagged at the Cash N’ Check next door for $10.99, so I’m not quite sure of their stated difference. This leads me to a good side-note: beware of inexpensive foreign wines with the words “Barrel Select,” or “Reserve” slapped on the labels; there is no regulation in most places and the words often mean absolutely nothing beyond “Buy Me.”

Anyway, we are going to roll with this one since it fits the (dollar) bill. The wine was dark and youthful, dense, full on the palate, but a little thin in the finish. It reminded me of the Argentinean version of some Italians I met while backpacking in college…A young boy still confused by the hair on his own chest, sauntering a bit over-confidently onto the dance floor to show off the Tango moves he half-heartedly learned in a high-school dance class, hair slicked back with oil and the top four buttons popped on his shiny red shirt. You can tell he’s going to be good looking in a few years—attractive even, once he gets more comfortable in his own skin and loses the silk—but tonight his cologne smells like potpourri made with a bit too many bay leaves, which would be unwelcome if it didn’t help mask the alcohol on his breath. Regardless, when all is said and done, if you think I’m not going to let him buy me a drink, spin me around the floor a few times, you’re mistaken.

Sometimes it’s good to be young.

Next week, the Bogle Old Vine Zinfandel 2007, California, $11.

You can’t walk through a Safeway without tripping over a Bogle display so I don’t want any excuses: buy it, drink it, and next week, we can compare notes.

’Til then, stay thirsty.

Cheers.

A few weeks ago, on November 11, The Whole 9 hosted a wine tasting in their fabulous and multidimensional art gallery in Culver City. The theme of the tasting was ‘Divas that Drink,’ and the powers that be (those powers being Lisa and Heidi, of course) invited me to help select a few tasty libations made exclusively by women winemakers and come up to the gallery to pour and talk and sip. Naturally, I jumped at the offer, and I’ve been itching to share the night with you since.

In attendance were both the expected (artists, photographers, wine professionals) and the unexpected (a golf instructor, a soon-to-be Christmas Elf from Santa’s Kingdom in the Westfield Mall). Indeed, the crowd was manifold, a collection of Whole 9 community members, gallery frequenters, wine enthusiasts, and those who came out in support of the ‘girl power’ theme of the tasting. The wines were equally diverse in terms of style and varietal, but in some ways the New World is a few steps ahead of the Old World of wine, so seeped in tradition it is, and there are many more female winemakers on the domestic front. For this reason we stuck primarily with American-made wines, with a dash of Spain for good measure: Domaine Carneros Brut, Carneros 2005 (Eileen Crane); Beringer Sauvignon Blanc, Napa Valley 2006 (Laurie Hook); Chateau St. Jean Pinot Noir, Sonoma County 2007 (Margo Van Staaveren); Bodegas Montecillo Crianza Tinto, Rioja, Spain 2005 (Maria Martinez-Sierra); and Covey Run Winemakers Collection Merlot, Columbia Valley, Washington 2004 (Kerry Norton).

The big hit of the night was unquestionably, and unsurprisingly, the Chateau St. Jean Sonoma County Pinot Noir 2007. Margo Van Staaveren has been making wine and waves at St. Jean (rhymes with bean, by the way, not pawn!) for 25 + years and was named the Wine Enthusiast 2008 Winemaker of the Year—the first woman to be granted the coveted distinction, incidentally. The quality of Chateau St. Jean is no secret, and its widely distributed wines are some of the most well known in Sonoma County. Truthfully, I think all of this has very little to do with the fact that I opened significantly more bottles of the pinot noir than anything else that evening. Simply put, people love pinot. We are still mildly suffering from the cultural backlash following that movie—you know the one. And wine consumers are just like consumers of anything else; we like, wholeheartedly and quite sincerely, what’s trendy. That said, the Chateau St. Jean Sonoma County Pinot Noir is perfectly gorgeous in the glass and on the nose, a glowing garnet smelling of leather, dried roses, and fresh raspberries. On the palate—dun dun dun duunnnn…it falls flat.

I don’t know what it is about this wine. It has all sorts of fabulous reviews from people much more important than I. It sells like you wouldn’t believe. But I imagine it’s like dating a model, or maybe Jessica Simpson: you feast your senses and you get all excited, thinking you’re in for a real treat, but pretty soon you realize there’s just not much going on. Similarly, I like Jessica Simpson; I think she probably has a good heart and I want to believe in her, the same way that every time I taste this wine, over multiple vintages, I feel a warm burst of hope when my nose comes near the glass, but by the time it gets to my mouth, it’s the same sad shake of the head.

The highlights of evening for me were the Domaine Carneros Brut 2005, an effervescent dream of a bakery full of fresh flowers, jasmine and orange blossom, big bowls of citrus scattered on the counters among the dough and the yeast. Domain Carneros also hosts one of my favorite tasting experiences of all time, by the by, and I highly recommend you stop there next time you are cruising though either Sonoma or Napa (as Carneros is so generously stretched in between the valleys, it is convenient for either). I was also a big fan of the Rioja, the Bodegas Montecillo Crianza Tinto 2005. The Crianza is the youngest of the Rioja wines (the word means ‘something raised or nursed’), and this $11 tempranillo is a vibrant, spicy treat full of ripe Bing cherries and vanilla bean. Maria Martinez-Sierra is known as a wildly charismatic yet shrewd businesswoman who occasionally invites the local Spanish growers over, gets them drunk, and then secures her grapes at the prices she wants to pay. If I said this didn’t make me like the wine just the teensiest bit more, I’d be lying. Girl power, baby.

Thank you to The Whole 9 for hosting such a fabulous event, and here’s to having another one soon.

Cheers.

As predicted, those old sinuses cleared up just in time for Friday night, and after a day of light chores and a long lunch, we decided to stay home and keep it simple. See, board games and wine has got to be one of my favorite evening activities ever. Last night, the custom came to Los Angeles with homemade pizza, our good friends Tim and Megan, and a friendly game of Cranium.

I topped the pizza, and Tim had already decanted the zin by the time it came out of the oven. Those who know me already know how I feel about pizza and zinfandel—suffice it to say that I would be pleased if that was the only thing served at my wedding some day—and as the zin was tasty but nothing to write home about, I am going to breeze over this part of the evening and invite you to join us after the plates are cleared, the game is out, and the real star of the evening has arrived: the 2006 Nobility, the special treat from R.A. Harrison Family Cellars I mentioned last week, next to a pile of Point Reyes blue cheese.

R.A. Harrison Family Cellars is a small winery in Napa owned and operated by Roger Harrison, a.k.a. Mr Botrytis. The man has been on the team responsible for making the award winning Nightingale Sauternes-style dessert wine at Beringer Vineyards since 1983, and when it comes to noble rot, he know what he’s doing. In 2008, after 25 five years of working with botrytis cinera at Beringer, Roger branched out and opened his own winery to further his dream of making these top-quality, extremely rare dessert wines in the style of the infamous Chateau Y’Quem in Sauterne, France. The Nobility, presumably named after the noble rot that gives it its signature concentrated honeyed sweetness, is the winery’s premier wine. And it’s damn good.

Some things in life just go together. Wine and cheese, of course, is one such thing. I know I don’t need to preach this to an audience such as yourselves, but allow me to say one thing: if you’ve never had Sauternes or a Sauternes-style dessert wine with a funky blue cheese, you simple haven’t lived.

Made with 50% Sauvignon Blanc from Napa Valley and 50% Semillon from Sonoma County, the Nobility tastes just like the golden sun that graces both of the beautiful valleys. It is fresh honey electrified with dried apricots and lemon zest. The Point Reyes Blue fills your mouth with bitter, salty cream. The sweetness of the wine cuts the funk, and acidity wipes your palate clean. The experience is like being a child again, running barefoot through tall grass under a hot sun, chasing clouds right to the edge of the waterhole and launching in feet first, the stick of summer immediately disappearing even as you crawl out of the water, anxious to be hot again simply so that you can cool off one more time. A bite of blue cheese, a sip of Nobility. Your tongue begs you for more. You concede. Well, we did anyway. Time and time again. And at 14.4% alcohol and one bottle of red already down, our repeated concessions started to show in our rosy cheeks and our increasingly creative Cranium strategies. When we pulled the Copycat challenge and Megan started singing “I Will Always Love You” as an impersonation of Celine Dion—and I got it right—I knew we had another successful night of perfect pairings.

Cheers.